Dan Condon: Sick Tunes, April 19, 2013

Hi all, I think I've finally recovered from an insane six or eight weeks of shows that had me drunk on both booze and music for perhaps a little longer than I should have been. Now I'm psyched for some more good music. Fuckin' send me some if you can, please.

Daft Punk – Get Lucky (feat. Pharrell & Nile Rodgers)

There's something really thrilling to me about ridiculous levels of hype surrounding anything to do with music; recent tours from the likes of Prince and Bruce Springsteen and the release of a new David Bowie record or Justin Timberlake single have seen these silly levels of excitement that just make me feel good.

So I love that everyone's talking about Daft Punk, and I love that plenty of people are getting really upset about it, threatening to unfollow or defriend the next person who posts a status update about them on social media. It's okay to be very excited about music and, frankly, I don't think it even matters that much if the record doesn't live up to the expectations we have built up for it.

Is Random Access Memories going to be any good? Who knows. What I can say is that the first single from it is probably the best disco song I have heard since Chic's Le Freak appeared on rage very late one night when I was in my early teens (how's that for ridiculous hyperbole?).

If you saw Nile Rodgers and Chic at Golden Plains last year, you'll agree that it was one of the truly great party sets you'll ever see – Rodgers makes great party music and has done so for decades. So it's suitable that he appears on Get Lucky, which owes a great deal to the influence of the '70s funksters, because this track will make you feel good. I think this could be the best pop song Daft Punk have ever written and, while there's nothing at all groundbreaking about it, I just love the classic soulfulness that pumps through it.

Bring on Random Access Memories.

Mavis Staples – Can You Get To That

I love Funkadelic more than just about anything else in the world and my love for both Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy is very, very, very close behind. So after hearing that Mavis is doing another record with Tweedy (yet no collaboration at Bluesfest this year? What's that all about?) and that it features a cover of one of the best Funkadelic songs out there… well let's just say I'd had a lot of coffee and not a lot of sleep and my chest started hurting a bit more than it probably should have.

It is divine, of course, and I cannot wait to hear One True Vine, which is out through Anti- in June.

Statik Selektah – Bird's Eye View (feat. Raekwon, Joey Bada$$ & Black Thought)

East coast producer Statik Selektah drops his new LP next month and, as per usual, he has enlisted a pretty amazing roster of east coast hip hop guests. Bird's Eye View features three of the best east coast rappers you could ever hope to have on your track right now. Raekwon, the Chef, one of the most vital voices of the Wu-Tang Clan, Black Thought, leader of The Roots, and Joey Bada$$, one of hip hop's freshest young talents who is all but guaranteed to have a long and fruitful career of ridiculously good hip hop.

The soulful track Statik lays down is incredibly infectious and just provides the perfect foundation for these three incredible MCs to dominate over – and dominate they do! One of the best hip hop tracks of the year thus far; but could one of Raekwon's old buddies have the last laugh…?   

Ghostface Killah – The Sure Shot (Parts 1 and 2)

The new Ghostface Killah LP, his tenth, is seriously good. Called Twelve Reasons To Die, it sees him team up with producer Adrian Younge (you might have enjoyed his work on the Black Dynamite soundtrack) who has put together a mighty set of tracks of funk and soul for Ghost and his mates (including Wu-Tang's Inspectah Deck, U-God, Masta Killa and Cappadonna) to set their brilliant rhymes to.

I'm not at all a comic book person, but considering the Twelve Reasons To Die LP is based on a comic book, I think I will have to be making an exception so I can really get to the crux of Ghostface Killah's lyrics on here.

Bleeding Knees Club - Feel

I will always love pop punk and garage rock, no matter how much kids in baseball caps wearing peace signs and adding Microsoft Paint sketches to pictures of cats try and dilute it into something far lamer than it ever was or should have become.

Bleeding Knees Club have always had fun, hooky songs that I've enjoyed and a bunch of songs from their Nothing To Do LP of last year are excellent fun to listen to while getting pissed and talking shit. While they were very much playing a brand of garage pop that was shining at its brightest (popularity) in the time and place in which they made that record, the first single we've heard post-Noyhing To Do is very different indeed.

Like a rough sketch of a Blink-182 song that came out of a Brisbane sharehouse circa-2004, Feel is quite striking different to their past output and it's bound to have an impact – both positive and negative – on the early fanbase they had established. While I'm not 100 percent sold on the song, I applaud the band for changing things up a bit.